✅ My Sister's Problem

77. Understood

I didn't get a chance to sit and just focus on Hugo's messages for most of the morning. Even when we were all relaxing and doing our own things, there was an endless stream of small distractions. Even my own brain wouldn't let me calm down. Lying back in my room, I couldn't stop thinking about how this was our special wek, we were on the beach, and it would be a shame not to take advantage of it. So I jogged down to the play area, and sat in the fort to read. But I could hear the call of seabirds in the distance, and it felt strange to ignore them. So I went out to the place we had always called the sun deck; a bunch of wide flat rocks that seemed to be permanently as warm as the sun. I rushed to put on suncream to keep myself from burning, and lay there for a while, letting my shoulders slowly turn brown as I tried to work out what Hugo was telling me.

I'd never tanned well. I was more likely to go pink than the beautiful golden bronze colour that Gabe could achieve so easily. And when I turned over to let my front get some sun time, I couldn't read the messages on my screen without putting a shadow across my chest, which would probably lead to some very strange tan lines. Not to mention that I would be staring straight into the sun. I left my spot and walked along the beach a little, and found a spot where I could relax in the shade and watch tiny crabs scuttling around the smallest pools on the beach. But my phone didn't have a good signal there, and it was only a few minutes before the first drops of summer rain splashed down around me, quickly swallowed by the fine, powdery sand.

I finally finished my reading back at our house, sitting on the deck while the building kept the rain off me. The smell of the rain, negative ions or whatever was supposed to make it so healthy, mixed with the sea salt and fish smell, and made a little cocoon in the middle of the beach where I felt completely safe, and nothing could distract me now. I could finish understanding what my neighbour had wanted to say, and hopefully calm the nagging dread that had been lurking behind the fun of the last couple of days.

Hugo didn't really understand relationships. And he didn't just mean romance; he included friends in that too. Everyone he spent time with had a specific reason, whether that was studying together with someone from school, or playing basketball with all of his friends. The same for me, I guessed, I'd been promoted from someone he had to be polite to because I was his sister's friend, up to somebody he was teaching to play basketball. Ticking the boxes, a reason for every interaction.

I thought that sounded like a pretty sad life, but then I thought about it and realised it wasn't so much different from my own. I had good friends, but I could always predict what we would be doing together if we met. It was just that I didn't normally see it like that. Maybe Hugo was just being honest with himself, overanalysing the way he interacted with others, and that meant that his friendships felt less natural than all the other people he saw laughing and joking.

And then I could finally get down to the meat of his message.

"I imagined you as a baby," his message said, and I nearly broke down. But I knew that he'd tried so hard to explain how he saw the world first, so there had to be more to it than that. He told me in way too much detail that when he'd heard Lindy call me a baby, and Mum apparently confirm it, that he had imagined me as a little baby.

He'd thought of me like one of the kids he'd done babysitting for, back when he had more spare time in the week. Giving them food, changing diapers if necessary, and doing whatever age-appropriate leisure activities their parents had suggested. Whether it was watching cartoons, playing with puppets, building Lego megastructures, or just watching them race around the room like headless chickens. Interacting with children was easier than people our age, because there were rules to follow, and usually a clear list of what was and was not appropriate behaviour. For a second he'd imagined me being a baby, and how it would feel to babysit for someone who was in his own year at school.